Page:Andreyev - The Little Angel (Knopf, 1916).djvu/158

152 Then he had felt cheerful, but now when death was hiding in the corners, and when day was rushing in upon him from every direction with the inexorable necessity to live and do something, to struggle after something and ask for something—he felt tortured and inexpressibly frightened.

"Are you asleep, sir?" Abram Petrovich inquired sarcastically through the door, and receiving no answer, added:

"Well, then, sleep away; devil take you!"

Many acquaintances visited Abram Petrovich, and throughout the day the door squeaked on its hinges, and bass voices were to be heard. And it seemed to Khinyakov at every sound that they were coming for him, and he buried himself the deeper in his bedclothes, and listened long to catch to whom the voice belonged. He waited and waited in agony, trembling all over his body, although there was no one in the whole world who would come to fetch him.

He had once had a wife—long ago—but she was dead. Still further back in the past he had had brothers and sisters, and still earlier—something indistinct and beautiful, which he called Mother. All these were dead, or possibly some one of them might be still alive, only so lost in the wide, wide world, that he was as though dead. And he himself would soon be dead too—he knew it. When he should get up to-day his legs would tremble and give way under him, and his hands